What the #@&% Is That?

by John Joseph Adams

  “Eventually. By that time, things between them were pretty dire. Her second year at Penrose, Sinead moved into an apartment with the kid. It was near the college. Apparently, Penrose offered pretty good childcare for its students and faculty, and this was where little Sean spent a lot of his time. Too much, according to Martin. He accused Sinead of dumping the kid at daycare or on her parents. Said that, half the time, he didn’t know where his son was. On one occasion, he showed up to collect the baby, and Sinead was out; she’d left her new boyfriend in charge of Sean.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah. Martin took her to court, but her parents hired a nasty lawyer for her, sicced him on Martin the way Sinead’s mom had wanted to in the first place. From what I understand, he shredded Martin into tiny pieces. I guess the judge was pretty sympathetic to Sinead too. The upshot was, Martin’s custody of Sean was limited to every other weekend; plus, he was put on the hook for all kinds of expenses in addition to child support.”

  “Could have been worse,” Linda said.

  “I’m sure,” I said, “but Martin didn’t see it that way. I don’t know if he honestly believed Sinead wasn’t taking proper care of their child, or if he was stung by losing the court case.”

  “Or both.”

  “Or both. Whatever the reason, he couldn’t let things alone. So he came up with a plan. He bought a dime bag of weed—”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Yeah, he did. Sinead had a habit of leaving her car unlocked in front of her apartment. He intended to drop the bag under the driver’s seat. Then, the next time she brought Sean to his place, he would just happen to notice the drugs. He would call the cops on her and, ultimately, gain leverage when it came to the kid. Unfortunately for him, Sinead’s boyfriend looked out of the window at the exact moment Martin had her car door open and was bent down inside it. She called 911. There was a police car close enough to show up before Martin had driven away. A big scene ensued. The pot was discovered. Sinead and the boyfriend accused Martin of planting it, said they weren’t into that kind of stuff. I gather they told the cops they could search the apartment if they didn’t believe them. Martin still had on the gloves he’d worn to ensure he left no fingerprints. Combined with him having been seen inside Sinead’s car . . . The cops took him to the station. I’m not clear what the charges were. Nothing too major. Sinead, though, used the incident to haul him back in front of the judge and have his contact with Sean reduced to one weekend a month.”

  “Well,” Linda said, “this isn’t the worst story I’ve ever heard.”

  “There’s more.”

  “More?”

  “This part I didn’t learn about until a few years later. For about a week, it was front-page news. One or two of the TV stations out of the city covered it. You would think Martin’s brush with the law would have taught him a lesson—scared straight and all that. It didn’t. Or it did, but the lesson he learned wasn’t a good one. Since his more modest efforts at rectifying the situation had failed, he decided it was time for drastic action. The legal system had shown it was no friend to him—or that he couldn’t manipulate it the way he wanted—so it could be ignored. He started doing research online.”

  “This isn’t some kind of murder-for-hire deal, is it?”

  “No,” I said. “What Martin had decided to do was take his son and flee the country. He spent months setting it up. Fake documents, fake IDs, fake passports, not to mention enough money to tide him over until he could find a job. Finally, when Sinead needed him to take Sean for a long weekend, he put his plan into action. He left his apartment pretty much as it was except for his computer. He removed the hard drive, wiped it with a magnet, microwaved it, and dropped it in the Dumpster outside the building. He drove to Stewart, where he took a flight to Orlando. He made sure to tell anyone who would listen that he was taking his son on his first trip to Disney World.

  “The two of them actually spent a day in Florida, but only so he could make himself up to look like the photo on his new passport. From Orlando, Martin and Sean boarded a flight to LAX, where they passed most of another day before catching a flight to Buenos Aires, via Miami.

  “Once they were in Argentina, he hung around Buenos Aires for a week, until he talked himself into a position as a tutor for the children of a cattle baron somewhere in the south of the country. That was where he was when the cops caught up to him three months later. He had done a good job at disguising himself and even the kid, but he was still a single man traveling with a young child. As soon as the cops figured out his new appearance, it was mostly a matter of sifting through hours of video from airport security cameras to reconstruct the route he’d taken. The way the papers presented it, he didn’t try to escape when the police arrived. He knew they had him. Sean was taken to Buenos Aires, where Sinead and her parents were waiting for him. Martin was thrown into an Argentine prison; although he lucked out—a little, anyhow. The guy whose kids he’d been tutoring liked him and had enough connections to have his sentence reduced from five years to nine months. The minute Martin was released, however, he was back on a plane to the United States, where his actions earned him another eighteen months behind bars.”

  “Holy shit,” Linda said. “What happened to him after?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I assume he got out and went about trying to put his life back together. From the way he looked last night, I don’t think that’s gone so well for him.”

  For a long moment, the two of us were silent. On either side of the street, large, well-kept houses signaled their owners’ wealth. We were almost at the tennis club.

  Linda said, “The things we do for love.”

  “Or revenge.”

  “You don’t think he loves his son?”

  “I’m sure he does. I’m also sure he hates his son’s mother.”

  “Hmm. Was she there last night?”

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t see her.”

  “Do you know if she’ll be at this thing tonight?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest. We weren’t exactly close in high school.”

  “All of a sudden,” Linda said, “things have become much more interesting.”

  III

  The second night of the reunion was in many ways like the first, with better food and with everyone in semiformal wear. At the entrance to the ballroom in which the dinner dance was being held, the reunion committee had set up a long table on which name tags had been laid in alphabetical rows. In addition to our names, the IDs of my former classmates and me bore wallet-sized reproductions of our senior portraits. As I pinned mine to my jacket, I let my eyes drift over the remaining badges but did not see Sinead McGahern’s. There were also name tags for a handful of former teachers, but Joel Martin’s name was not among them.

  Linda and I were seated with a group of people with whom I had been friendly during senior year. One of the guys had taken over the family business, a sit-down Chinese restaurant at which his wife had been a hostess. Another guy was not long out of the Air Force, and not long married to the young woman with him, who kept expressing her concern over their daughter, who I gathered was only a couple of months old and being watched by his mother. I asked the restaurateur if he’d kept track of a few of my favorite teachers; he said he wasn’t positive, but he thought they were dead. I asked the ex–Air Force guy what he was up to now; he said he was managing a Radio Shack in eastern Massachusetts. During these exchanges, something that had occurred to me the previous night became clear. Of the people with whom I would have considered myself especially close during my four years at Our Lady of Fatima, not one had opted to attend our reunion. Who knew where they were? (I tried the restaurant guy; to each of their names, he said he wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d heard of a number of personal catastrophes including drugs, prison, serious injury, and devastating illness.)

  This left me at an event like a restaging of my senior prom, complete with all the songs and dance moves that had not aged particu
larly well. Linda actually seemed to be enjoying herself. She had managed a Chinese place in Albany at one point, and her father had been in the Air Force, so she was able to maintain conversations with both of my former classmates. About halfway through the event, the DJ—a local celebrity who anchored the morning show on the classic rock station and had been a couple of years ahead of us in school—announced that it was time to read the memories people had written on the slips of paper provided at each table. (I had chosen not to.) In the midst of recollections about specific teachers’ classes, and sporting victories, and trips here and there, someone contributed a note that read, “I had sex with one of my teachers.” I felt as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over me. I’m not certain what response I anticipated from the rest of the audience, but the most the confession received was a scattering of laughs and a couple of approving howls. Linda gave me a significant glance. Had someone else slept with Joel Martin? Or, God help me, had one of my old classmates had an affair with another teacher? Yes, it was naïve to be this shocked, but so what? Apparently, I hadn’t left my younger self as far behind as my appearance might have suggested.

  I was not expecting Joel Martin to show himself at this night’s festivities, not really. It was one thing to chance slipping into a room packed with people busy with one another and sitting with your back to them while you sipped from your cocktail. It was altogether another to stroll into a ballroom whose tablefuls of your former students would have little trouble identifying you. All the same, when I turned from the urinal in the men’s room and saw him standing against the door, the phrase that almost escaped my lips was “Of course.” It was as if that anonymous admission had summoned him here. I couldn’t imagine what he would want with me. I crossed to one of the sinks and washed my hands.

  “Nice place, this,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, “it is.”

  “You ever been here before?”

  “No. First time.”

  “I was. Years ago. One of the senior classes a few years ahead of you guys had their prom here. I was a chaperone; brought my girlfriend at the time. This was—you would have been a freshman. Yeah, freshman.”

  I finished drying my hands, dropped the paper towel in the trash. “I should be getting back. My date—”

  “I guess you heard about my . . . troubles,” he said. “Yeah, you did. Who didn’t? Especially after they were all over the front page of the Goddamned papers.”

  He was right; there was no point denying it. I nodded. “I did.”

  “Do you have any kids of your own?”

  “No.”

  “Let me tell you, once you do, you will not believe you could love anyone that much. You look at this little wrinkled creature, its arms and legs still tucked up from being in the womb, and it is love at first sight. There is nothing you will not do for this kid. Your entire focus shifts from whatever bullshit you thought was important to making sure this child—your child—is okay. All the things you couldn’t imagine doing—changing dirty diapers, dealing with spit-up, waking up in the middle of the night to rock them back to sleep—become the order of the day. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “I do.”

  “Everything I did, every last bit of it, was for my son, to keep him safe, to give him the kind of life he deserved. I have always wanted what was best for him. Always. I never stopped wanting that, even when I was locked up in Argentina, or when I came back here so they could lock me up some more. My son’s mother had taken him and left. She didn’t leave word where. Didn’t ask for child support from me, in case it allowed me to trace them. Was that fair? I ask you, was any of that fair?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess she felt—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Joel Martin said. “While I was in prison in Buenos Aires, I met a guy who let me in on something that is going to get my son back and make certain no one takes him from me again.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Do you know who Borges was?”

  “The writer?”

  “This guy I met was a friend of his. That’s what they called him, the other prisoners, the Friend of Borges, el amigo de Borges. He’d hung out with Borges when he was younger, at university. He was a mathematician, into some pretty exotic stuff. There was this one story Borges had written, ‘The Aleph’—have you read it?”

  “The one about the point that lets you see all other points in space and time.”

  “Exactly. The guy was fascinated by that story, by the math underlying it. Poincaré theory—how well do you remember physics class?”

  “Not at all.”

  “That’s disappointing,” he said, “but it isn’t important. The conversations with Borges took the guy only so far, but the writer put him in touch with one of his friends at the university, who gave him the name of another person, and so on, until he met with a group who were familiar with the theory underlying the aleph, and a lot more besides.”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t get it. That’s all right. Do you recall me telling you guys that everything was just math?”

  “Yes.”

  “You thought I was talking figuratively—if you gave it any thought at all. I wasn’t. The group the Friend of Borges met understood this. They comprehended it. They were part of a . . . tradition of scholars who had been working with this exotic math for a long time. Like, longer than you’d believe.”

  “I’m not—”

  “These scholars had figured out all kinds of applications for the material they were studying. They had worked out how to employ it, using combinations of words and sounds and . . . mental images, you could call them.”

  “It sounds like you’re talking about magic.”

  “What you call it isn’t important. What’s important is that it works.”

  “Then why was this guy—the Friend of Borges—in prison? Couldn’t he just magic his way out of there, teleport or something?”

  “He was in hiding,” Joel Martin said. “Or, that’s not it, exactly. He’d had a falling-out with the other members of his lodge, and he had decided to secure himself within Unit 1.”

  “Couldn’t he have found a better place to hide out?”

  “That doesn’t matter!” he shouted. “You’re missing the Goddamned forest for the trees. I’m telling you I met the modern-day equivalent of fucking Merlin, and you want to know why he isn’t staying at the Hilton. Jesus!”

  There was no doubt in my mind that my former teacher had traveled far, far around the proverbial bend. I raised my hands, palms out. “Okay. I’m sorry. You met the Friend of Borges, and he told you about this weird math. Did he teach any of it to you?”

  “A little. You can appreciate, the conditions weren’t ideal for this kind of instruction. What he did was to tell me where I needed to go once I was free to travel again. Which took a while, and I had to work a bunch of shit jobs to save up the money, but in the end, I got there.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Where was it?”

  “Quebec.”

  “Quebec?”

  “Quebec City. That’s where the nearest lodge—the nearest school is.”

  “And they took you in—accepted you as their student.”

  “They did.”

  “So now you’re one of them, a . . . mathematician.”

  “Basically.”

  “But—why are you here? If you have access to the aleph, or whatever, shouldn’t you be using it to track down your son?”

  Joel Martin’s face drew in on itself, to an expression it took me a moment to name: embarrassment. He looked down at his shoes, stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. “There’s been a slight complication.”

  Here it comes, I thought, the escape hatch, the detail that allows the fantasy to exist yet remain ineffectual. “Oh? What kind of complication?”

  “I’m imprisoned. The master of the lodge guards his knowledge jealously. He doesn’t introduce you to new material until he’s s
atisfied that you’re ready for it. I had passed all the basic tests with flying colors. Everyone said I was one of the best students they’d taught in years. They—the master wanted me to wait before studying anything more advanced. I was sure I didn’t need to. I was eager—I could feel time slipping away from me. Every day, and my son is getting older, whatever memories he has of me growing fainter. Have no doubt, his mother and whoever she’s with are doing all they can to erase me from his life. I needed access to the aleph now. I pressed the matter with the master. He wouldn’t budge. Things got heated between us. I made some . . . intemperate remarks. The master invited me to act on them. I did. It didn’t go well. When the dust settled, he trapped me in a place . . . It’s kind of a place between places. He said if I could figure my way out of it, I might be ready to start learning again.”

  “You’re in prison,” I said.

  “Imprisoned,” he said. “Again. It’s more complicated than the other lockups I’ve been in. There’s a limited amount of energy sustaining the cell. I can draw on it, but every time I do, the space constricts. If I had accepted my sentence, I could remain here indefinitely. But I told you I can’t do that. I have to get out of here. I tried reaching out to one of the other students at the lodge, someone I thought was sympathetic to me. I was wrong, and I shrank the prison. I decided I had to think more creatively—outside the box, ha-ha. It occurred to me that your ten-year reunion was coming up. I was able to find out the times and locations without making the cell too much smaller.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You’re in this cell.”

  “Correct.”

  “Yet you’re standing here talking to me.”

  “This,” he said, removing his hands from his pockets to gesture at himself, “is a simulacrum. It’s as if you’re talking to me on a videophone.”